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Originally Posted by the_fat_man
I've been playing the horses and, thus, BEL/AQU/SAR, since the early '70's. I've never seen it this bad at BEL. Not only in terms of all the races coming off but in the quality of the races. Do you realize that on any given day CD, MTH, HOL, AP, WO, etc. have better quality turf races than NYRA? NYRA's basically recycling the same old tired horses -- claimers and NY BREDS.
And this is just the view of someone who only plays BEL peripherally. I can only imagine what the horsemen must be thinking: they get a ton of hassling and money is taken out of their pockets on top of that.
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Living up in Saratoga (where it's also been raining on and off for the better part of June), I can't comment on the weather from first hand experience, but from what I hear from our trainers, it just seems that the weather downstate has not been conducive to drying the turf courses. I'm sure a few sunny, 90 degree days will do that, if they ever come. Until it happens, we all have to do the best we can, and I speak as someone trying to get a horse on the turf (but I'm not looking to run him over a boggy course for his first start on turf). Actually, as BTW said above, there have been a few times where we were looking for a race to come off the turf, and it was surprisingly kept on given the relative softness of the course.
As for the quality of racing at this spring's Belmont meet, I think everyone realizes that it is less than what it was a few years ago, but to simply blame NYRA for it is silly. The deterioration of the racing product in NY is a symptom of a number of other factors (including state government's inability to get a slot operation up and running, the competition for horses from other states, and the proliferation of large stables that have taken many of their "B" team horses to venues like Monmouth, Delaware and the like [where they are allowance types instead of claimers in NY]). If you follow the condition book, the racing office is writing the same types of allowance races that they have for years; they simply don't fill, and that's a function of some of the factors discussed above. The types of races that you bemoan are typically "extras" when the book races don't go.
That's not to say that there aren't some "new" programs that the racing office has adopted that have not worked out. For example, the overnight stakes that they are constantly carding seem to be cannibalizing the allowance races. Look at the overnight stakes race that served as Friday's feature. It was a glorified allowance race, as most of those fillies were eligible for NW1X and NW2X allowance conditions. Now, they aren't available for the allowance races that the racing office is trying to fill, which becomes a vicious cycle. And it is even worse, as occurred on several occasions at Saratoga last year, when they ran overnight stakes with almost identical conditions to a graded stakes virtually on top of the graded race (the Jim Dandy, Test, and Lake Placid are three that come to mind immediately), taking horses from those races.
Another misstep, IMO, has been the change to drawing cards three racing days out. Sure, handicappers can get the PPs in their hands early, but when some cards are drawn five days out (for example, today they drew Thursday's card), they are even more at the mercy of the weather than ever. In the past, when cards were drawn 48 hours in advance, if the weather looked particularly ominous, they'd adjust the card (turning turf races to dirt races in advance), so that it would not be decimated with scratches. The current system, given the unpredictability of long-range weather forecasts, doesn't lend itself the sort of improvisation described above, and when bad weather strikes (as we have seen this month), the result is somewhat predictable.